SLAVERY remains an emotionally charged and difficult topic to address. The descendants of its perpetrators respond to it today with guilt, indifference or defiant denial. On the other hand, the descendants of its victims tend to hold Europeans solely responsible and minimise African complicity in the trade.
A common defence of slavery is that it existed in Africa before Europeans started the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery did indeed exist before European arrival in West Africa. However, its status was fluid.
A slave’s position was not always permanent. Slaves could emerge out of slavery and attain high status and leadership in society.
For example, one of the most influential chiefs in southern Nigeria, Jaja of Opobo, was a slave who rose to become one of the most powerful figures in his region. Additionally, many emirs who ruled northern Nigeria were sons of slave women.
The transatlantic slave trade intensified the demand for African slaves. As the trade became more lucrative and the demand for slaves increased, African slave traders terrorised their neighbouring communities, engaged in slave-raiding expeditions, and triggered artificial wars to capture slaves for sale to Europeans.
Although transatlantic slavery was a one-way ticket, and slaves could not return from America to warn their kinsmen of its horrors, in their quest for quick profit African slave dealers blinded themselves to the devastation they brought to their neighbouring communities and ethnic groups.
Although it was not intentional, the slave trade disrupted West Africa in a manner that made it vulnerable to conquest by Britain. The fear of being captured and sold into slavery made some Africans voluntary prisoners of their own villages and cities.
Venturing too far away from home carried a risk of being captured by slave hunters. This inhibited inter-community and inter-ethnic alliances and cooperation.
This lack of inter-ethnic patriotism later came back to haunt Africans and contributed to their inability to form a united coalition to oppose British invasion and rule. Slavery also drained the population of its able-bodied adult population, leaving behind the elderly and young children.
The first British ships to reach the land that later became Nigeria were led by Captain Windham and arrived in the Bight of Benin in 1533. Portugal and Spain were the leading slave-trading nations, but Britain eventually surpassed both of them.
Britain entered the slave in 1663 when King Charles II granted the Company of the Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa a royal charter and monopoly on trade in Africa. The company was contracted to supply slaves to British colonies in the West Indies.
Britain became the leading figure in a triangular three-continent trade in which Europeans would travel to Africa, buy slaves there, then export them to the Americas. Badagry, Lagos, Elem Kalabari (Old Calabar), Bonny and Calabar (New Calabar) became major trading ports.
The number of slaves exported was staggering. In the 20 years between 1680 and 1700, according to conservative British estimate, Englishmen alone shipped at least 300,000 African slaves. In the 54 years between 1676 and 1730, Benin shipped 730,000 slaves (42 per cent of all slaves taken from the African continent during that time period).
Slavery became so routinised and associated with this part of West Africa that the area became known as the Slave Coast. In the 17th century the cost of a male slave was 13 iron bars and a female slave nine iron bars. To give some idea of the “price” of a human being, one iron bar could buy half a gallon of brandy, a bunch of beads, or a piece of textile.
In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht granted Britain a 30-year monopoly on the slave trade. Although European businesses that traded in Africa were often owned by wealthy men, the traders and crew who worked for them were not from the upper echelons of society.
A British slave ship captain named Hugh Crow said that “many of the individuals composing [slave ship crews] were the very dregs of the community: some of them had escaped from jails; others were undiscovered offenders, who sought to withdraw themselves from their country lest they should fall into the hands of the officers of justice.”
According to Crow, “these wretched beings used to flock to Liverpool and attach themselves to sailing crews as a convenient method of absconding abroad to escape justice. Placing vulnerable slaves under the supervision of such criminals led to an astonishing level of casual cruelty”.
Britain’ increasing industrialisation, combined with a growing abolitionist movement by Christians, eventually led to Britain’s decision in 1807 to make it illegal for its citizens to engage in the slave trade with effect from 1 January 1808.
After abolishing the slave trade, Britain stationed a naval squadron off the West African coastline to intercept slave ships heading for the Americas. The slaves recovered from these ships were sent to Sierra Leone and resettled in a colony of freed slaves on land bought from locals. This land was later christened “Freetown” and remains the capital of Sierra Leone to this day.
Britain’s abolition of the slave trade produced a generation of emancipated slaves who received a British education in Sierra Leone, converted to Christianity, and became Britain’s representatives for the spread of Christianity in West Africa.
Max Siollun is a historian and author who specialises in Nigeria’s past, focusing on the country’s military. The above are excerpts from his latest book, What Britain Did To Nigeria, published in 2021 by Hurst, London
This article is republished from the September-October 2022 edition of the Africa Briefing Magazine
